Now that the Radeon HD 4850 has been hanging around for a bit, we're beginning to see more and more companies jump on the aftermarket bandwagon. The latest company to do this is Palit, bringing the highly popular Radeon HD 4850 to the also highly popular Sonic line. The Radeon HD 4850 has had so much going for it from the word go, its aggressive pricing and excellent performance gave users everything they wanted. It wasn't all rosy, though, while the use of a single slot cooler was handy, it caused the card to run extremely hot. This isn't the first time we've mentioned this, it doesn't mean we don't want it to run cooler. Along with overclocking the card, Palit have strapped a new cooler on. - TweakTown

Palit Radeon HD 4850 Sonic Graphics Version Review

Palit have gone with a new box design this time around, it's slightly bigger, giving our old mate FroBot a bit more room to stretch his legs. There isn't actually a while lot going on with the front of the box, apart from FroBot in the middle we also have a bunch of logos running down the left side of the box. Across the bottom we have a sticker that mentions the model. Also mentioned are some of the features like 512MB of GDDR3 memory, two dual link DVI, PCI Express 2.0 and a few other things along with mention that a minimum of a 500W power supply should be used. And the back has smore on the specifications in detail.

With the package out of the way, it's time to move onto the card. Upon pulling it out of the box, we have to admit we were surprised not to see the standard gold dual slot cooler that we're so used to seeing from Palit over the last twelve months. Instead, we have a black cooler with an aluminum heatsink sitting in the background. In the middle we have a fan and if you look you can see two heat pipes that run up from the center of the cooler and out the top, then down the sides of the heatsink. What was interesting, we found a 8-pin connector instead of the standard 6-pin PCI Express one used on the standard Radeon HD 4850.

Continuing to look around, we have our two CrossFire connectors across the top of the card which isn't anything out of the ordinary. With the card carrying the Sonic naming scheme, like we have already mentioned it does mean it comes overclocked out of the box. The core has moved up from 625MHz to 685MHz while the 512MB of GDDR3 memory comes clocked in at 2000MHz effective. There's no doubt that we're going to see more and more Radeon HD 4850's with aftermarket cooling hit the market. The Palit is a nice little option that comes with a decent cooler which helps keeps temps down.

We don't doubt performance could have been better, whilst it isn't at all a bad overclocking setting applied from factory. With other brands seeing as high as 2200MHz effective on the memory, Palit have chosen to keep things more conservative this time around, leaving the memory at an even 2000MHz effective, which results in a very small overclock. The good thing about Palit is the aggressive pricing, which means you can actually get your hands on one of these cards for similar prices, or sometimes cheaper than what some brands charge for the stock model, which makes it quite an attractive purchase.

Overall, the card gives us a nice little boost in performance while also managing to keep those pesky temps at bay when compared to what the stock cooler does. We would have liked to have seen a bit more done with the memory clock, though, to help it stand out a little bit more in the performance department.